RSA Conference, day three/four

This is the third and final report from the RSA Conference. Sorry if you were expecting this a day or two ago, but... well, let's just say circumstances conspired against me.

BoxSentry Ditches Challenge/Response; Fights False Positives:

Singapore-based BoxSentry has historically been known as a challenge/response spam filter vendor. Readers will probably be aware that I'm no fan of C/R.

As time goes by, BoxSentry has gradually de-emphasized C/R, but until recently it was still sending challenges for a small but significant proportion of the spam it received -- and hence was sending unsolicited "replies" to people who had never sent email to the BoxSentry user.

Manish Goel, BoxSentry's CEO, confirmed to me that his company no longer uses C/R. That's great news for Internet users. Well done, Manish; I know that I and others have been thorns in your side for a while about this; I appreciate your good humour in our occasional, heated debates!

Manish also brought other news...

AVG loves its freeloaders:

AVG makes one of the last free AV products. Here at RSA, I talked to AVG CEO JR Smith, about why his company is sticking with the freemium model.

According to Smith, it's great having the majority of their "customers" who don't pay for the product. It makes lead generation really easy. Not only are they able to up-sell consumer users who download the free version, but many of those consumers also recommend the use of AVG inside of the SMB in which they work..

Astaro drops its R&D-led roadmap:

I also met Angelo Comazzetto. A Canadian, of Italian heritage, living in the U.S., working for a German company.

When I met him last year, his business card said something like Evangelist. These days, he's the product manager for Astaro's line of low-cost Unified Threat Protection appliances. Dspite his title change, he's not lost his passionate, high-energy, rapid-fire delivery style ;-)

Some notes from our meeting:

• "600 new features" in the past year
  • based on win/loss analysis and other customer requests
  • no longer R&D-led roadmap!
  • Versions 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 all "major" releases...

More on these topics and more, over at RichiJennings.com...

Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 24 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: cw.comment@richi.co.uk.